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Back to the Windows Road

#技术#杂记189
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The author shares their experience of using Windows as their main computer for work and life for two weeks. They highlight the improvements in system interaction and developer experience, such as the improved start menu and file explorer, excellent split-screen function, and Microsoft's embrace of open source with WSL2 and Visual Studio. However, they also note some bugs, issues with permissions, and difficulties with software package management. Overall, the author is pleasantly surprised by their experience with Windows.

Recently, I have been working on Windows for more than two weeks. I will briefly record my user experience.

Background#

Recently, I just configured a high-end desktop (i9-13900k+4090). My previous MBP became a meeting notebook, so I started to use PC as my main machine. Due to the drivers being too new, I couldn't find a suitable Linux distribution. Ubuntu often encountered "Internal Ubuntu Error," so I started using Windows as my main work and life machine. After two weeks of use, I found that the user experience of Windows exceeded my expectations. Let's discuss it below.

Advantages#

After many years of primarily using Windows, I feel that there has been significant progress, mainly reflected in

  1. System interaction
  2. Developer experience

In terms of system interaction, Windows has absorbed many essences from other systems and software, which I feel is a significant improvement. Let me mention a few that left a deep impression on me:

  1. The Start menu has been improved and feels more user-friendly than before.
  2. The improvements in File Explorer, such as supporting tabs, are quite comfortable.
  3. The excellent split-screen function allows you to drag windows to the top of the screen to choose different split-screen ratios and applications. At the same time, when switching tasks, there is the concept of Task Groups. Isn't this better than macOS by 10 Linux?
  4. The overall support for dark mode themes is much better than before.

Overall, the experience of using Windows has improved a lot compared to the previous versions, bringing many surprises.

Then, in terms of developer experience, Microsoft's strategy of embracing open source in recent years has been reflected in the optimization of the developer experience on Windows.

  1. WSL2 is currently much more user-friendly than WSL1, and IDEs and other tools are well supported.
  2. The compatibility of WSL2 has exceeded my expectations. Tools like BCC/eBPF that rely on the kernel can run normally on WSL2, which is great.
  3. Visual Studio's support for CMake has exceeded my expectations, which is excellent.

Indeed, Microsoft is now a good friend of developers (:

Disadvantages#

Although there has been a significant improvement in the Windows experience, there are still some drawbacks:

  1. There are quite a few bugs, such as freezing the interface when reordering tasks in the Task Manager (which may also be related to me using the dev channel of the insider preview).
  2. There are many minor issues with WSL2, such as memory leaks or backup export failures.
  3. Permission management in Windows has always been a problem. I still don't understand why Genshin Impact, as a game, needs UAC. Are they checking if I have installed games like Lily on my computer?
  4. Despite having tools like scope, software package management on Windows is still a bit cumbersome.
  5. It seems that there is no centralized software distribution system like setapp on MacOS. I don't know if I haven't found it. Anyway, buying software is too scattered, which is quite cumbersome.
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